CHAPTER SUMMARY

This relatively brief chapter prepares us for a transfer of power from Shmuel (to whom, we do not yet know). Having aged, Shmuel attempts to retire, placing his sons in charge of judging the people. The match does not work well—among other things, the navi describes the sons as hankering after money and bribes—and the people, pointing out his sons’ failures to Shmuel, ask him to appoint a king.

Shmuel is not pleased by their request, and prays to God. God tells him to listen to them, to recognize that they are not rejecting him, Shmuel, but Him, God, as they have in their idol worship ever since leaving Egypt. God does warn him, however, to inform the people of the kings’ rights.

Shmuel tells the people that the king will have broad rights of taxation and drafting—he can take men and women, fields and orchards, servants, animals, and so on. Shmuel warns them that they weill call out to God for assistance, Who will not answer them. Nevertheless, the people (obstinately) insist on a king. Shmuel reports their desire to God, Who tells him to listen to them, and Shmuel sends them home.

SHMUEL’S AGING

Ta’anit 5b envisions Shmuel as having died at the age of 52. As we have mentioned before, that same passage thinks Eli lived until Shmuel was 39, and that Shaul became king when he was 49. I would note that Abravanel suggested a different chronology, one that gives more time, among other things, for the years of Shaul’s reign. Taking Hazal seriously, though, we need to understand how they understood events here.

Assuming that the people had the good grace to try out Shmuel’s sons for a year or two (it is somewhat churlish to immediately reject someone who handles situations slightly differently from his/her predecessors), the description of Shmuel as having aged comes when he was in his late 40’s, which, I hope we all recognize, is not generally old age. Hazal recognize the problem, and suggest that old age came early to Shmuel, so that it would be legitimate for him to die at the age of 52, already having had his heart broken by Shaul’s failed kingship, but not yet having to witness his death.

Hazal’s answer raises a couple of questions. First, why would Hazal assume that Shaul’s troubles would be so distressing to Shmuel that he would prefer to die than to see them? Second, what does it mean that Shaul’s future (especially if we assume that he had free will and could, theoretically, have made good choices) affected Shmuel’s life already?

SHMUEL’S SONS

The answers to those questions lies in the whole king-selection experience, a section of the chapter we will come to in a moment. Before that, we might spend a paragraph or two on Shmuel’s sons. Radak, in verse 2, highlights three errors they made: first, they did not circulate throughout Israel, as Shmuel had. Second, the city they selected to inhabit was at the outer edge of the Land. Third, Hazal suggest that the sons did not actually take bribes, but that their decision to stay in one place was at least partially motivated by a desire to aid certain kinds of local business (scribes, etc.). Radak further suggests that their interest in money, their fascination with building up a fortune, was the problem to which the verse referred.

Even in that version, Shmuel’s sons are too economically motivated. Without stepping over the line and taking a bribe themselves, they are willing to create business for friends and family, almost certainly benefiting from those economic boons indirectly (such as by living in an economically thriving city, which is generally more fun than living in an economically depressed town). It is those desires, I suspect, that would characterize the sons as hankering after money, a problem in judges of the Jewish people.

While Hazal indicate that the prime motivation is money, I think the experience of rabbis (and their children) two generations ago provides further insight as well. Rabbis (both of shuls as well as educators in schools) in the forties and fifties, toiling in an America where Orthodoxy had not yet taken firm root, often gave of themselves beyond their means, both physically and financially. Their children, having grown up in poverty and without the presence of the fathers they longed for, often rejected their fathers’ paths (sometimes, sadly, by leaving religion altogether, but even more often by not going into the profession), and were inclined to insure that their families had a reasonable lifestyle, with at least a moderate living, and a job that allowed them to be present for their families.

Yoel and Aviyah, Shmuel’s sons, may have had some of the same feelings. Having grown up with a father whose entire life was dedicated to the people (as Shmuel’s mother had promised), who spent some months of every year on the road, we can easily imagine them, wanting to continue their father’s holy work, but insistent that they do so on their own terms. They weren’t going to travel; they weren’t going to live where the people wanted them, and they weren’t going to accept the kind of economic irrelevance that Jewish communities were willing to allow for their judges.

Hazal certainly see them as having gone too far, but it is perhaps true that Shmuel went somewhat too far as well (it is frequently true that when a child fails at a task of adulthood, the parents share some of the responsibility for that failure). Without casting any aspersions on his personal conduct, Shmuel seems not to have succeeded at teaching his sons the minimal requirements for being judges.

This failure of parenting seems particularly poignant given what we have previously noted about the contrast the navi drew between Eli, the failed parent, and Hannah and Elkanah, the successful ones. For all Shmuel’s personal success, he did not manage to make that example one that his sons could emulate in their own lives.

THE REQUEST FOR A KING

The people, not satisfied with the sons, approach Shmuel for a king. In their request, they bluntly inform him that his sons "have not followed" his paths. Even before we find out their request, and Shmuel’s negative response, this insensitivity (what parent wants to hear that his sons are failures in the family business?) indicates that they are not acting here out of a sincere concern with everyone’s best interests.

That aside, the request upsets Shmuel so greatly that he prays to God, whose answer shows that Shmuel’s concerns were correct. The problem with this reaction, both by Shmuel and by God, is that the people here seem to be demanding only the right to fulfill a mitsvah in the Torah. In the beginning of Parshat Shoftim, the Torah orders the Jewish people to establish a king; why, when the people ask for one, does it bother Shmuel?

The answer to this question depends first on how we read the verses in Shoftim. While almost all medieval commentators understood the verses to be a command, a mitsvah de-oraita, Abravanel and some others claimed that the verses are actually only a reshut, a permitted institution but not a required one. For these commentators, the problem here is that the people are choosing to avail themselves of an option that Torah had not really been excited about.

For the majority view, that there was a mitsvah to establish a king, the people’s motives here are seen as explaining Shmuel’s reaction. The people refer to the king as being ke-khol hagoyim asher sevivotai, like all the nations that surround us, meaning that they are not looking to fulfill the Torah’s command, but to mimic the nations. Malbim, in fact, thinks the Torah only wanted a king to help the people wage war, whereas the people are insisting on the broader institution found in the surrounding nations. Without going through every possibility, these views focus on an aspect of the request—motive, scope, and so on—that was problematic. Had the people waited for the right moment, had the right motive, and so on, this view assumes that Shmuel would not have been bothered.

GOD’S PERSPECTIVE

Some support for that view comes from God’s consoling words to Shmuel, where God sees the people as having rejected Him, rather than Shmuel, a puzzling statement, since the people had not overtly rejected anybody other than Yoel and Aviya(Shmuel had retired and God was not the issue).

If we remind ourselves of Shmuel’s central mission, to remind the Jewsih people of God’s presence in their midst (inherited from Elkanah, who developed an annual relationship with God, and from Hannah, who only secured a child by prayer to God), we may understand God’s and Shmuel’s reactions to this issue better. A king, aside from his usual tasks and responsibilities, was also meant to fulfill this role (as evidenced by the requirement that he always carry a sefer Torah with him and read from it all the days of his life). Had Shmuel fully succeeded at his task, we would have hoped that the people would have asked for a leader (king or no) who would have furthered that goal. Their interest in being similar to the nations around them shows that they have not yet learned the desired lesson.

It is only in that sense that I can comprehend God’s paralleling this incident to their past tendencies towards idol worship. Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, there is no obvious relationship between the desire for a king and idol worship; if the king was supposed to further our relationship with God, however, and we instead look to him as an end of his own, the parallel to idols becomes more clear.

MISHPAT HAMELEKH

Shmuel is told to warn the people of the king’s powers, which Rav and Shmuel debate in Sanhedrin 20b. Rav assumes that this warning is really only meant to scare the people, but that the king should not, in fact, act this way. Shmuel holds, and Rambam in Hilkhot Melakhim 4;1, as well as Rashi on the verse in I Melakhim 4:13 seem to rule this way le-halakhah, that the king has the right to do all the things Shmuel mentions here.

To the extent that we assume that creating a king really is a mitsvah (and here the only problem was either timing or motive), and that these are the legitimate powers of the king, we are left to wonder why God would grant the king such wide powers. Although this is not our topic here, I would briefly suggest that, properly wielded, wider powers of government are more productive in achieving society’s goals. The reason we find it necessary to limit governments’ powers, as we do, has to do with our lack of faith in the goodwill and self-discipline of the governors we have (a result of long and bitter experience with tyrants and despots, continuing into our times). Theoretically, however, (and, as we will see, David haMelekh is a good example of the theory, as are numerous, but not all, of his descendants) a king armed with broad powers can best promote truth, justice, and the Torah way of life.

THE OBSTINACY OF THE URGE TO CONFORM

Although the timing was not right (I would argue), which could easily lead to abuses of power, the people were not deterred in the least, perhaps another sign of how inappropriate their desire for a king was. They should at least have needed some time to consider whether they actually wanted to sign away their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of possessions, ceding all of those to the discretion of the king. Whenever an urge is so strong that we feel that it must be fulfilled immediately, regardless of consequences, it is probably worth questioning ourselves and the depth of our desire.

Inthis case, though, Shmuel simply sends them home, a remarkable end, since it means that the people trust that he will now begin the search process for a king (kings aren't found in a day, appaently, even when the search committee consists of God and His prophet). That could mean that they don't even realize how deeply they have upset him, an example of their insensitivity, or that their relationship with him was so solid that they had no question about his keeping his word. Shabbat Shalom.